The Argument in Your Head: Why We Rehearse Conversations That Haven’t Happened

You’re driving home, having a disagreement with someone who isn’t in the car.

You know what you’ll say. You know what they’ll say back. You’ve prepared a reasonable explanation, a slightly less reasonable explanation, and something devastating you probably shouldn’t say out loud.

By the time you pull into the driveway, you’re irritated with a person who hasn’t actually spoken yet.

There’s a whole conversation to recover from. Only one of you attended.

If you’ve ever watched George Costanza become consumed by the perfect comeback, you know the territory. In the Seinfeld episode “The Comeback,” George gets insulted at work and becomes determined to recreate the encounter so he can deliver his response. The moment is over. George is still trying to win it.

Our own versions can be less funny to live inside. We rewrite yesterday’s disagreement, then rehearse tomorrow’s. Somewhere between the two, the evening disappears.

What are you hoping the rehearsal will give you?

Sometimes practicing a conversation is useful. You need to ask for a change at work. You want to tell your partner something difficult. Writing down the main point can help you stay clear when you’re nervous.

But sometimes the preparation keeps growing. Every possible response requires another explanation. Every explanation reveals another way you could be misunderstood.

You might notice a wish underneath all that work: If I get the wording right, maybe I won’t have to feel dismissed. Maybe they won’t be disappointed. Maybe this time I won’t freeze.

Those are understandable hopes. They also ask a great deal of a sentence.

You can choose your words carefully. You can’t make another person’s response completely predictable.

If speaking up has gone badly before, it makes sense to approach it cautiously. The useful question is whether this particular rehearsal is helping you decide what to do—or keeping you occupied with possibilities you cannot settle alone.

Preparation needs somewhere to end

Psychologist Edward Watkins’s review of repetitive thought describes how repeated thinking can have helpful or unhelpful consequences. Its effects depend partly on the context, the content, and whether the thinking stays abstract or becomes concrete.

That distinction gives us something practical to look for.

“How can I ask for twenty minutes to talk after dinner?” points toward an action.

“Why do they always misunderstand me, and what if nothing ever changes?” can keep expanding without giving you a place to begin.

The Centre for Clinical Interventions also distinguishes worry from problem-solving. Worry can circle around possible difficulties; problem-solving develops steps for something you can address.

Try asking yourself: What has this round of thinking added?

A clearer request? A decision about timing? A boundary you need to keep?

Or are you delivering the same closing argument to the same imaginary jury?

You don’t need to criticize yourself for noticing the loop. You’ve found a moment where you can choose what happens next.

Notice which conversation you are in

In my Temporal Narrative Therapy approach, I look at how the past, present, and anticipated future overlap.

An old experience of being dismissed may influence what you expect tonight. You imagine the eye roll, prepare your defense, and arrive already braced for a fight.

That expectation may have a history. It is still worth separating what you remember, what you predict, and what is happening now.

For example:

• What happened: My partner asked whether I paid the bill.

• What I predicted: They’re about to tell me I’m irresponsible.

• What I noticed: My jaw tightened, and I started listing everything I did this week.

• What I can choose: Answer the question, then check what they meant if I’m unsure.

Perhaps there is criticism to address. Perhaps they simply need to know whether the bill was paid. The distinction matters, and an imagined exchange cannot resolve it.

A small experiment before the next conversation

Choose an ordinary conversation where you feel safe enough to speak honestly. Give yourself a few minutes to prepare these three things:

1. The point you want to make.

“I’d like us to decide our weekend plans together before we commit.”

2. The feeling that makes this difficult.

“I’m worried you’ll hear that as me not wanting to spend time with your family.”

3. A question you genuinely want answered.

“How have you been thinking about it?”

Then stop writing the other person’s lines.

Notice where you are. Feel the chair under you or your feet on the floor. See whether you can loosen your jaw a little. You do not have to feel perfectly calm before you speak. You are making room to hear something you haven’t already rehearsed.

If the mental argument starts again, you might tell yourself: I have my opening. I’ll learn the rest in the conversation.

Sometimes you will need a boundary rather than another discussion. If this person threatens, intimidates, or punishes you for speaking, the priority is support and safety; this exercise isn’t a request to make yourself more vulnerable to them.

Let the real person have a turn

George wants another chance to deliver the line. Understandable. Most of us have a few conversations we would like to edit.

But in a relationship you want to keep building, there is something useful about entering the room with a little space left in your expectations.

The other person may surprise you. They may disappoint you. You may discover that your first explanation didn’t land and you need to try again. You can respond to what actually happens as it happens.

Before the next difficult conversation, ask yourself:

Am I preparing to speak—or have I already decided what they’re going to say?

You can know what matters to you and still leave that question open.

If overthinking and relationship patterns keep following you through the day, learn more about working with me in Kansas City. We can slow the pattern down and practice a different response.

Find the pattern. Change what comes next.

When Couples Therapy Quietly Takes a Side

“The therapist sided with my partner.”

I have started hearing some version of that sentence from men who have been in couples therapy.

It would be easy for us, as clinicians, to hear this only as defensiveness. Sometimes being challenged does feel like being judged. Sometimes a therapist is naming real harm, and the person who caused that harm would rather not face it.

But if we stop there, we may reenact the exact problem the feedback is pointing toward.

Couples therapy can quietly become lopsided without anyone intending it. One partner’s pain is visible and compelling. We feel it. We understand why they are angry, exhausted, or afraid. Then our curiosity begins moving in only one direction.

One person becomes the injured partner. The other becomes the person who needs to change.

We may be accurate about the impact of their behavior and still be losing the therapeutic alliance.

The Room Can Tip Before We Notice

Imagine a familiar kind of first session.

One partner tells the story with urgency. They have been carrying hurt for a long time and are relieved to finally have someone else in the room. Their examples are clear. Their emotion is close to the surface.

We feel the pull to protect what has not been protected.

We turn toward the other partner. We ask about the withdrawal, the anger, the secrecy, the defensiveness, or the failure to respond. The questions may be reasonable. The concerns may be serious.

But somewhere along the way, the second partner stops being another person in pain and becomes the subject of the session.

Their explanation sounds like minimizing. Their silence looks like avoidance. Their confusion feels evasive. If they become defensive, the defensiveness seems to confirm our growing understanding of the problem.

By the end of the hour, we may believe we have confronted an important pattern.

They may leave believing the verdict was decided before they finished speaking.

When Accountability Eclipses Curiosity

Accountability matters in couples therapy. There are moments when one partner has caused a specific injury and needs to take clear responsibility for it. Not every conflict is equal. Not every pattern is shared fifty-fifty.

Balanced therapy does not mean pretending betrayal, cruelty, coercion, or intimidation is simply a communication problem. Where there is ongoing abuse or coercive control, safety has to come first.

But accountability can become less useful when it arrives before understanding.

When we identify strongly with one partner’s hurt, we may begin asking one person about their feelings and the other person about their behavior.

To one partner, we ask:

“What has this been like for you?”

To the other, we ask:

“Why did you do that?”

One person is understood in context. The other is questioned in isolation.

That difference can be subtle. It can also determine whether both people remain emotionally present enough to do the work.

Understanding is not the same as agreement. Curiosity is not absolution. If we understand the fear beneath someone’s withdrawal, we have not excused the loneliness it caused. If we understand the shame beneath defensiveness, we have not erased its impact on the partner trying to be heard.

We are simply trying to understand enough of the pattern to help change it.

How Men Can Become the Identified Problem

This experience is not exclusive to men, and men are not one kind of client. Anyone can feel blamed, outnumbered, or misunderstood in couples therapy.

Still, it is worth examining the way we sometimes meet men in the room.

Many men arrive with more practice explaining, fixing, defending, or going quiet than naming vulnerable emotion in real time. We may see the protective response before we see what it is protecting.

Their partner’s hurt may be easier to recognize. His fear may arrive disguised as an argument. His shame may sound like a list of facts. His overwhelm may look like indifference. His attempt to prevent another failure may appear as withdrawal.

None of those deeper feelings makes the behavior harmless. But when we engage one partner at the level of hurt, fear, and longing while engaging the man mainly at the level of anger, shutdown, or defensiveness, we create an important imbalance.

One partner gets an inner life. The other gets a treatment plan.

This can happen to any of us, regardless of gender. It is not necessarily conscious bias or deliberate siding. It is often identification moving faster than inquiry.

Research gives us reason to take that seriously. A meta-analysis of couple and family therapy studies found that more split or unbalanced alliances were associated with poorer outcomes. A separate study of first couples sessions found that therapists interrupting men was associated with lower alliance ratings from both male and female partners.

The point is not that interruption alone explains why men feel unheard. It is that alignment is communicated through small moments: who gets interrupted, whose meaning gets explored, whose account is treated as complete, and who is asked to explain themselves again.

Understand Before Challenging

The sequence matters.

Understand, then challenge.

Not understand instead of challenge.

Before asking someone to own what their response did to the relationship, we can slow down what happened inside them:

• What story did you tell yourself in that moment?

• What feeling appeared before the anger, explanation, or silence?

• Where did you notice it in your body?

• What were you trying to protect?

• What did that protective choice communicate to your partner?

This is the movement I often track in my own work: Story → Feeling → Body → Choice.

It allows us to hold two truths at once.

“I want to understand why you shut down. And we are also going to look honestly at what your shutdown did to your partner.”

“I can understand why you became urgent. And we need to examine how that urgency became criticism.”

“Your reaction makes sense from the inside. It is also creating pain between you.”

People do not have to be protected from accountability. But they are more able to take responsibility when they do not also have to fight for their basic humanity in the room.

Check the Alliance With Both Partners

In individual therapy, we monitor one working relationship. In couples therapy, we are holding several at once: our alliance with each partner and our alliance with the couple as a shared unit.

A strong conversation does not automatically mean all of those alliances are intact.

One partner may be nodding because the session finally makes sense to them. The other may be getting quieter because they have stopped believing their experience will matter.

We cannot always read that accurately from body language. Sometimes we need to ask:

• Did either of you feel that I understood your partner better than I understood you today?

• Was there a moment when this began to feel like two against one?

• Did I challenge either of you before you felt fully understood?

• Are we working toward a goal that still belongs to both of you?

If someone says the room felt one-sided, our first job is not to prove our neutrality. It is to understand what happened that made the experience feel true.

That may lead to clarification. It may reveal that necessary accountability was experienced as attack. It may also reveal a real rupture that needs to be repaired.

Either way, the feedback is part of the therapy—not an interruption of it.

Two People Against the Pattern

The goal of couples therapy is not perfect neutrality. Neutrality can become so cautious that nothing honest gets said.

The better goal may be active fairness: an equal commitment to understanding each person’s internal experience, naming the impact of each person’s behavior, and protecting the possibility of shared work.

Both people heard.

Both people challenged.

Neither person reduced to the permanent problem.

When a man says, “The therapist sided with my partner,” we do not have to accept that interpretation as the entire story. But we should not dismiss it as resistance before becoming curious about it.

The therapeutic room should be one of the few places where accountability does not require anyone to surrender their humanity.

That is how we help two people stop building a case against each other and begin seeing the pattern they are both caught inside.

Not two against one. Two people against the pattern.

If couples therapy has felt one-sided before—or if one of you is worried that it will—I offer couples therapy in Kansas City and virtual sessions for clients located in Missouri. My approach focuses on the pattern without turning one partner into the problem. You can also learn about Temporal Narrative Therapy, read more about emotional shutdown in men, or schedule a consultation.